


pearl by pearl

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Epistolary, F/F, Femslash February, Stream of Consciousness, carpentry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the first day of spring in Skyhold, Leliana pens a letter to the Hero of Ferelden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pearl by pearl

**Author's Note:**

> First posted on [ tumblr ](%E2%80%9Dklickitats.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) for Femslash February.

It’s not until after Josephine waltzes into the rookery bearing an armful of flowers—white ranunculus from the mountainside—that Leliana remembers.

She drops them onto her desk in a satisfied tumble of green and white. The downy faces gaze up at her.

“It’s the first day of spring,” Josephine chirps.

“Josie,” says Leliana, “there’s still snow on the ground. And the day is nearly over.” Outside, the sunset dyes the peaks of the Frostbacks pale and pink.

Josephine waves her hand, as though the machinations of heaven and earth are pesky obstacles to be overrun. “It’s too early for the Grace to be in bloom,” she goes on, “so I hope this will do.”

“How far did you have to climb?” Leliana wonders aloud, touching a pillowed bloom with a gloved fingertip. “You did not go alone.” The warning tone creeps into her voice, and Josephine rolls her eyes.

“A mile, if that–and do not look at me so, I took the commander with me.” Leliana raises an eyebrow, and Josephine’s eyes are suddenly anywhere else. She smooths down her velvet skirts. “He appreciated the exercise and the cold, and the view is so lovely from the cliffs.”

The pause gleams with potential and Leliana doesn’t say a thing before Josephine adds hastily, “You mistake the view I speak of.”

“I said nothing.” Leliana does not reveal her smirk. “Yet I am sure both of you found the sights fair wondrous.“

"Enjoy your flowers,” Josephine says, and disappears down the stairs.

The first day of spring. Leliana opens her desk and finds parchment and ink. The flowers stare at her with patient faces. She exhales and puts pen to paper.

 

 _I promised you would never go through this day alone_ , she writes, _and yet this is the fifth time._

 

Each memory is a pearl strung on silk thread. Leliana is alone–she can think of each one, pearl by pearl, in peace. A Denerim elf with hair gone a preternatural gray. Soft as a storm cloud. The top of her head only came to Leliana’s shoulder. Long, long eyelashes, a sharp chin, a jagged scar parting her lip in two places. A carpenter in her alienage, blessed with broad shoulders, hands coarse with calluses. _Tal the Builder_ , they called her.

They met in Lothering. Tal on a rooftop in her shirtsleeves, nails poking out of her mouth, hammer in hand. She spent two whole weeks there, helping them build shanties for refugees, doing repairs for a place to lay her head or a loaf of bread. She carried her simplest of tools, wrapped in leather, everywhere. Leliana was returning from visiting a mourning family at the behest of the mother, when there she was—one of the Grey Wardens everyone had been muttering about.

And then, with an ominous creak and a loud crack, fell through the roof.

Nobody knew why Tal became a Grey Warden–not even Alistair, who bumbled along behind her as though she were Andraste incarnate. Stony, silent, small. She did not laugh easily, did not smile at Leliana’s quips or frown at Morrigan and Alistair’s constant bickering. In fact, she and Sten seemed a perfect pair, dispersing emotion with an admirable amount of economy.

Tal, who one day dropped an armful of Andraste’s Grace in Leliana’s lap as she mended her bow by the fire. They’d been traveling together for three weeks, and only spoken directly to one another twice. 

She’d never seen so much at once and was too stunned to thank her. “Why?” she blurted, fingering the delicate petals. The sweet scene of them cupped her face like an old friend.

“You like them,” Tal said, and walked off to the river to wash.

Leliana’s knife has a bloom sloppily carved on the leather pommel. Hardly recognizable. She had drawn it only once, the day before, in close quarters with a hurlok.

(Leliana has never written Tal’s family name—she has never told her, never told any of them. _Nothing I do will touch my family_ , she said, and that had been that. It took her a year to find out Tal is a shortened form of _Talya_ , a name she confessed with a wrinkling of her nose. Leliana has since bestowed that particular face with a moniker: _a portrait of rotten lemons._ )

 

 _But each year I wonder how you pass this day_. _If you go find something to build, or something to kill, or if you sit by a river and wait for the hours to pass._

“I don’t like the way you make decisions.” Leliana, tired and covered in darkspawn blood, picked slivers of offal from her hair.

Tal didn’t say anything. The soft shriek of her whetstone along her knife-blade makes intolerable music.

“You don’t even take a breath to think,” she accused. “You don’t seek our opinion.”

“Do you disagree?” Tal finally looked up from her knife. “I chose not to annul the tower. Would you have put them to the blade?”

“No.” Leliana’s fury at even being questioned on such a topic was palpable. Her success in cleaning her hair remained minimal—only smearing it around, really. “But if you had chosen opposite—“

“I imagine you would say _stop_.” Tal raised an eyebrow.

“That’s not the point.” Black blood under her fingernails too. She decided to be done with the conversation.

But Tal stood, and suddenly knelt at her shoulder, gently pushing Leliana’s head forward with her hand till her chin touched her chest. She heard her open her waterskin, and suddenly there was a rough hand in her hair, lukewarm water dripping from the tip of her nose

“I think of how you would act.” Tal’s voice. Her hand slid through Leliana’s hair, rubbing against her scalp. “Almost always.”

Leliana was nearly too soothed by the rocking motion, by the strong fingers and the indignant remark she’d pressed down in her chest— _why are you wasting your water ration for tomorrow_ —to reply at all.

“Why?” she finally manages. Tal’s fingers stroked from the soft spot below her ear all the way to the crown of her head. Darkspawn blood, she reminded herself. Heavy, bitter, black.

The pause was long; Tal plucked a particularly sticky piece of detritus from her scalp. “No one listens to a room like you do,” she said, finally. Her thumb lingered on the back of her neck, made soothing circles against the skin, the wound muscles there. “You understand everything I can’t touch.”

 _You know nothing about me,_ Leliana thought with sudden rebellion. _You think I am a Chantry sister with a bleeding heart._

“I will ask,” Tal said simply, massaging her fingers into Leliana’s neck, and it stuck her suddenly how the motion was nothing like a collar, nothing like a leash. Tal’s hands soothed, and pressed, and soothed.

It was a promise, Leliana realized later. A vow.

_I have a confession to make._   _Knowing you, you will not write for a year after I make it._

 

A river bank, on the first day of spring. Rain for days, for miles, completely inescapable. Tal sat under a tree, having talked to no one for an entire week of travel. She would not spar with Sten, or help Alistair repair his armor, or let Wynne braid her hair into complicated coils and knots.

Leliana found her there and sat beside her without asking permission.

They lingered there and said nothing. Before midnight, Tal unwound a parcel from the bottom of her pack. A dress, exquisitely beaded with tiny stitches of red, gold, and blue. Plain and brown, Leliana thought, until she realized the dress was white, once, before it was covered in blood.

She will find pieces of the story with her, bit by bit, year by year. But that first night, that first anniversary, they did not speak at all.

Tal let the river take it, watched the cloth bathe in watery moonlight as it trailed away. A ghost without a heart, a shroud without a body.

 

_I have played at not knowing where you are long enough._

_You find comfort in this. Your condition: letters through the seneschal at the Keep, and only there. No one can know where you are. But I have followed your every move._

The first place Tal kissed against her skin was the strong plane of her sternum, just above her breasts. Hands on her waist, in a shadowy corner of a Denerim alleyway. Leliana had sung some old folk song in the tavern, something to fill a hat with a few coppers so they could afford a night in one of the seedier inns. The one about the moon come down to the village as a maiden only seen at night. 

(It rakes at Leliana—an honest gap of pain in her memory—that she can no longer recall the words of the song, only the tune, and only sometimes.)

Those strong, broad hands, rising up her back. The careful touch made her arch, and her lips pressed there for a long time, as though she delighted in the fluttering of her lungs beneath the skin, the little pulses of her racing heart.

“It was the highest place I could reach,” Tal admitted later, a mutter at the back of her neck, and Leliana laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

_I know you lost a finger in the sulfur-valley of the Hissing Wastes._

Neither ever sleeps with any weight. Tal can’t rest her head without being in just the right place in accordance with the door, unless there’s a knife within arm’s reach. In the human-filled parts of the city, she doesn’t sleep at all. Leliana has nightmares of nooses, of strange faces speaking to her in the dark. When she bolts upright, Tal waits, awake, to make promises with her hands on her skin.

 

_I know you pulled a dragon’s tooth out of a carcass and sold it for passage to Rivain._

 

Tal’s hand gripping Marjolaine’s hair, a knife at her throat. No words, just a single nod. _Whatever you want_ , it said. And Leliana stared, knowing the willingness of that knife was as sure as a hand on her soul, as sure as a flower blooming under Andraste’s finger—this newfound power, this clean breath of life. All to say, _let her go._

_You made Wynne’s coffin yourself, and watched her buried beneath a yew tree. You asked a mage for the right glyphs to carve into the surface. She never wanted to burn._

“I can’t find my father,” Tal said. They can’t find anyone. The alienage is as empty as her voice.  

_You will open this letter in the middle of a spring storm in the South Reach, on the bank of an elvhen ruin._

 

The cotton-soft feel of those grey wisps against her cheek in the morning, every morning, for a whole year. And then another, and another.

_I imagine none of this surprises you. I doubt it ever will._

_I suppose your comfort in my ignorance leaves you unfettered to pursue whatever means and ends you need, whether they be into dragon’s mouths, or golden palaces._

_But I will no longer pretend you are alone._

When Tal goes, she leaves no letter, no note, no flowers on the dresser. Just carpenter’s tools, wrapped in leather, gone supple-soft with use and touch.

_All I have are the pieces. May this letter be the thread._

_— L_


End file.
